Imaginative Possession

 I bought Imaginative Possession: Learning to live in the Antipodes after hearing Belinda Probert speak on the radio. As an immigrant from England, she found adjusting to the shape and meaning of the Australian landscape a difficult leap; not just the heat and the bright light, the wide horizons, but the look of the trees, the sound of the birds and the shape of the hills and fields. Eventually she bought a country property in the Victorian Otways, to create a garden as a way of making herself more at home, and she admits the this was not a wholly successful experiment.

The project of Imaginative Possession caught my attention because it raises some of the same issues I was grappling with in Crow Country -- how can strangers to this land, especially those of us brought up on European stories, myths and meanings, adjust ourselves to and learn to love this very different place, without trying to apply the more familiar language of the Northern Hemisphere that has shaped out imaginations? The obvious answer is to ask the original inhabitants, but this is a route that European immigrants have been sadly reluctant to adopt. At last we are learning to listen and to see with the eyes of those who know this place so much more intimately than we do.

Imaginative Possession is filled with enticing titbits of information. Australian birds tend to screech and squawk rather than sing, because birds (not bees) are the main pollinators in our flowering forests, and have evolved to scare off rivals to the blossom harvest. The poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti owned a pair of wombats and mourned them when they died.

Probert (like me) is the kind of person who tends to turn to books for enlightenment, and she quotes many other writers in her quest. Some I was familiar with: Billy Griffiths, Bruce Pascoe, Bill Gammage, Judith Brett. Others, like Kim Mahood, I don't know, but I'm looking forward to discovering. Part memoir, part rumination, Imaginative Possession perhaps ends up raising more fruitful questions than it answers.